Independent Media Productions, Inc., an Austin-based video production company, has been honored with a Videographer Award. "Black Holes: Stranger Than Fiction" is one video in a series of astronomy-related videos produced by Independent Media Productions for the University of Texas at Austin's Texas Cosmology Center. The Videographer Awards is an international awards competition that recognizes out standing achievement in video productions.

Narrated by StarDate radio's Sandy Wood, the video explains the different types of black holes, from stellar-mass black holes to supermassive black holes, and speculates on how they are created and evolve.

A black hole is like something out of a science fiction writers notebook. Imagine an object that grabs hold of anything that falls within its gravitational influence and refuses to let go. Its victims disappear forever into a gravitational maw that is entirely black and emits no energy.

The concept of black holes has intrigued scientists for the last century. In 1783, Londons Royal Society heard an amazing new idea from Rev. John Michell, a top British scientist. He surmised that numerous of the galaxys stars might be dark. He thought a star could be so dense that gravity would prevent light from escaping the stars surface, making it a dark star.

Black holes are complex to explain, and this video unlocks the subject through real photos from space, artistic renderings and animations and interviews with prominent astronomers and professors. The script was written to appeal to a broad audience, not just astronomers or astronomy buffs. Independent Media collaborated on the video production with the Texas Cosmology Center and StarDate.

We enjoyed helping Texas Cosmology Center and StarDate bring these complex topics to life by creating content-rich videos to educate the public. The astronomer interviews shed light on the subject, and it was fun to shoot and edit, all the way through post production," said Steve Corder, Executive Producer at Independent Media Productions.